AlmaLinux 10 for 64 bit Arm, a free RHEL 10 compatible enterprise Linux base for Azure Cobalt 100 Arm virtual machines.
AlmaLinux 10 is a community owned enterprise Linux distribution produced by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation to be binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, running the 6.12 kernel and following the RHEL 10 lifecycle, with active support to May 2030 and security support to May 2035. This is the 64 bit Arm (AArch64) build with the standard 4k page size kernel, for the Arm based virtual machine sizes powered by the Azure Cobalt 100 processor, which pair strong per core performance with lower cost than comparable x86 sizes.
It suits teams standardising an enterprise Linux baseline on Arm: web and application tiers, containerised workloads, CI runners and cost sensitive fleets that want the RHEL 10 compatibility they already rely on, on Arm silicon. This listing tracks the AlmaLinux 10 major release; the machine reports the current 10 point release it is patched to at procurement time.
The cloudimg image is an AlmaLinux 10 Arm64 base brought fully up to date at build time and again immediately before capture, booted on its newest kernel with superseded kernels removed, with SELinux left in Enforcing mode and the root password locked. No credential is baked in: access is by the SSH key you choose at launch, root cannot log in over SSH, and SSH host keys and the machine id are regenerated per machine, so no two instances share a secret or an identity. Automatic updates are installed, armed and enabled, never auto rebooting, so the machine keeps patching itself. SSH is the only network listener, BaseOS, AppStream, CRB and Extras stay enabled so you keep a working update path, no subscription or licence key is required, and 24/7 support is included.